Saturday, April 29, 2017

I started this blog in 2003 - and first blogged about PowerShell (well, it was called Monad in those days) on 1 Nov 2003. It's been a long run with PowerShell - since that first day when Jeffrey Snover presented 'Batch Scripting, what you can do in 7 lines of code' to PDC 2003.

As Robert Hunter once wrote (and the Grateful Dead sang) "What a long strange trip it's been".

I'm working on a new PowerShell book. The book's title is Windows Server 2016 Automation with PowerShell Cookbook (ISBN: 978-1-78712-204-8). The focus of the book is showing how to manage key Windows Server 2016 features using the latest versions of PowerShell. For each area covered, I show how to do things using Powershell, in the form of recipes. The intention is to both teach a bit about the feature itself, and show you how to manage the feature using built-in and add-on modules.

In a few cases, there is no built-in way to perform some operation using PowerShell. My favourite example is that the Printing cmdlets provide no way to create a printer pool, but you can in the UI. In that case, and others, the book shows useful Win32 console applications. In the case of printer pools, we show how to use PrintUI.DLL and RunDll32.EXE to set up a printer pool. IT pros can't yet do everything with PowerShell, out of the box - but in many cases, that's just not a problem.

The book has 13 chapters, as follows:

What’s New in PowerShell

Implementing NanoServer

Managing Windows Updates

Managing Printers

Managing Server Backup

Managing Performance

Troubleshooting Servers

Managing Windows Network Services

Managing Network Shares

Managing IIS

Managing Hyper-V

Managing Azure

Using Desired State Configuration

At the time of this post, I'm nearly done the drafting of the book's contents, and entering into the slow, tedious, and boring part: the editing and final proofing. It may be slow, tedious, and boring, but it's very important, as any writer knows.

There were several hiccoughs with the writing, but it's looking now like this book will be published in the autumn. As soon as I have a more definitive date, I'll post it.

[Later]
Publication should be early October. Sadly, my planned co-author had to drop out of the writing due to personal commitments. Additionally, I had to scale back a bit on the contents. The original plan was to write 450 pages. The book ended up something like 650!